Ron’s First Day in Heaven
My PhD advisor, Ron Graham, passed away last month, on July 6, 2020. He was one of the most amazing people I have ever met. His extraordinary math abilities were surpassed by his kindness, generosity, and effervescence. I, and all those he impacted, will miss him dearly. I don’t know if there’s a heaven, but it gave me a smile to think how he would have spent his first day there. I wrote a poem imagining this, and it is contained at the bottom of this post. If you are already familiar with Ron, feel free to skip to the bottom now. Otherwise, here is some background on Ron. Ron was a leader in the field of combinatorics, publishing hundreds of papers, many quite influential. He was also a close friend and a decades-long collaborator of Paul Erdős, who apart from publishing more papers than any other mathematician in history… had a few quirks. He was a genius without a permanent job, and a world traveler before that was at all common. He would arrive on a mathematician’s doorstep and ask “Is your mind open?” If they said yes, then they would begin work together. Erdős imagined a book in which God wrote down every theorem, and following each theorem He wrote down the best, most beautiful, most elegant proof of that theorem. Ironically, Erdős was an agnostic atheist, yet his idea of “The Book” caught on, and soon it entered the standard vocabulary of research mathematicians. It also highlights a common belief among mathematicians that proofs should be beautiful. As G.H. Hardy said, “There is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.”
Erdős also referred to God as the SF—the Supreme Fascist. He joked that proving theorems was like stealing points from the SF in a game which no human can win, but they can at least work to keep the SF’s score low.
